


hearts a mess

by theviolonist



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Drugs, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-31
Updated: 2012-05-31
Packaged: 2017-11-06 10:14:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/417693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theviolonist/pseuds/theviolonist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two ways their lives could've gone wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hearts a mess

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really not sure about this one, and it's not my favorite out of all the things I've written, but here you go. Title from Hearts a mess by Gotye.

He doesn't know how his sister got hold of his number. When he picks up, he remembers the tiny stars she got tattooed in the inside of her wrist when she was thirteen. She got in such trouble with their mom for it, but she said it was all worth it, eyes shining, pressing her fingers lightly on each star, saying things like 'hope' and 'love'. He remembers the easy laugh that had rolled over him, and the heat of her cheek against his.  
   
"Waliyha," he croaks.

She sighs. 

He lets her talk him down from his high. His boots make humid sounds as he walks along the Thames in the lurid night – the streetlights are blurred in the distance, kind of like stars.

*

He doesn't meet Harry so much as he  _meets_ Harry, shoved into his body by a random stranger, a pretty brunette with purple butterfly glitter swirling on her temples. It's too late, or too early – there's a hint of red dawn outside, back with a vengeance, but they can't see it. Zayn melts into the stranger's body without guilt. It's a strong torso, large hands, hot in the small of his back.

Zayn lets his head fall on the stranger's shoulder. He's exhausted, but there's music coursing under his skin, and he just can't let go, can't leave when it's dark and shining, shimmering dreams coming close only to draw away. He holds on, lets his limbs move with the beat. There's a story starting beneath his fingers, and it doesn't have a happy ending.

" _Darling_ ," the stranger says in his ear, hot and  _close_ , and suddenly there's a thumb pressing something against his lips, a pill, and Zayn doesn't know, doesn't understand, everything is moving so fast, so fast, and the stranger tilts his head up and kisses him before Zayn can even see him clearly.

(He still doesn't remember him clearly from that night, but time has pasted his traits on the unknown features: cherub cheeks, devil curls, and the smile that crooked at the edge of his mouth and stole his soul.)

*

He gets introduced to Harry by Louis. Louis is still mostly okay, an errant boat navigating their fallen circles to remind himself of who he doesn't want to be. Sometimes he shows up a little too thin, a little too scarred, a little too crazy, but mostly he's okay. Zayn told him to get out of there, but he doesn't listen. Zayn understands, maybe.

"Harry Styles," Louis says in a ringmaster tone, white powder obscenely coated to his nostrils.

Harry Styles levels him a vacant gaze, and all Zayn can think before John tugs his sleeve and pulls him away, a promising syringe in hand, is,  _no saving for this one_.

*

Lightning hits Zayn square in the chest and leaves it gaping, blood spilling into Harry's oustretched hands. Harry kisses him like there's nothing else, no Niall watching them with a vicious eye, like he doesn't have to breathe, like there isn't a pill burning between their tongues, slowly spreading its demon euphoria into Zayn's veins.

It all goes downhill after that. A year loses itself in mindless parties and the skin of Harry's stomach, hands fluttering to touch  _everywhere_ and touching nothing, a syringe always close at hand. They manage to keep it away from the press at first, but Harry's as famous as he's reckless, and sometimes he shows up on movie sets looking wrecked, his forearm full of holes.

Zayn is more careful. His singing gets worse, throat permanently dry, but he keeps up. At night he meets Harry in a limo and they sniff a line before throwing themselves at each other, fucking the night away through the high. The bliss makes them babble promises they never remember, but Zayn can't ignore the  _pull_ , the irresistible attraction that draws him towards Harry. He drinks himself into oblivion not to acknowledge it.

Their life never stops; it's a freight train, and they look at the wall with wide open eyes, and they see a blue sky where there's nothing but gray concrete and the promise of chaos.

*

There is no saving Harry, that much is clear. He doesn't want to be saved, anyway – he says so himself when he comes back to the squat and kicks at everyone who tries to touch him, his too-big hands curled into nasty fists. Zayn strays clear of him.

 There is something about Harry, the broken beauty of his delicate face and tired eyelashes, his split lips and slit wrists, but the truth is, there are a thousand others just like him out there. Harry is lucky, if there's luck here (but there isn't), because he has something more, but Zayn doesn't want to know. He has enough lovers as it is, and Charlie takes up all his time, constantly nagging him.

Zayn knows plenty about mermaids, but he's already been caught once.

Sometimes he sees Harry's absurdly green eyes fixed on him when they're all together, cross-sitting in the middle of the room, huddled together like a herd of scrawny hyenas, but he knows that Harry isn't looking at him.

*

The paps catch them stumbling outside of a club on a day that could be anything except maybe sunday. They're high on a syringe they shared in the bathroom after a rushed blowjob. There's dried come between Zayn's knuckles and the tell-tale ringing in his ear. It sounds like a fire alarm, but he's learned not to mind it (he's already in the middle of the fire, and he lit it himself – who is he to complain?).

Harry pulls him in a kiss and Zayn falls a little harder. They don't buy the newspapers the morning after, but Zayn gets glances of titles,  _Zayn Malik And Harry Styles Drug-Addict Lovers?_ and _Harry and Charlie: a love story?_  The second one would've made him laugh if it wasn't so true.

They fuck like rockstars when they're high, fast and hard, Zayn's head banging against the headboard, sweaty and messy and everything they should be for a few minutes before falling back into the damp reality, exhausted bodies whose souls have been sucked out.

Harry kisses him like a possessed man, and he says,  _it's okay, it's okay_ with a manic grin, but then he goes to vomit in the bathroom (sometimes he doesn't reach it, and now Zayn doesn't even bother to clean the splatters on the walls and the carpet – he just vacates his apartment and lets his housekeeper do it) and Zayn has to go and hold his hair so he doesn't choke on it, and he thinks,  _hell no it won't_ , a brief moment of lucidity before the animal itch starts back up.

*

They talk for the first time in the middle of stairs. It's oddly representative of their life, Zayn thinks stupidly, always half-up and half-down, never quite one or the other (high with the imminent down, head full of crazy fantasies and gaudy lavomatic dreams; down with the memory of the high, teeth sinking into the carpet).

Harry lights a fag and sucks on it like it's a lifeline. It screws his face up – he looks a hundred years old. He has a black eye and a bruise on his hip, where his shirt is riding up. Zayn knows these kids by heart – he was one of them. 

"How'd you buy your crack, anyway?"

Harry shrugs.

"I get around," he says, sweetly self-deprecative, and he tumbles down the stairs.

Zayn watches him get lost in the night, his hunched shoulders and his too-thin frame. He takes a thirty-minutes nap on John's shitty mattress, not moving because his back is right on what he suspects is a small puddle of come, and then John comes back and the devil walks in on nimble feet, putting madness in his eyes and shivers in his spine.

*

Harry kisses him from head to toe, messily, uncoordinated. He fumbles with Zayn's clothes, hands shaking badly. He's sweaty, nose running, looking wrecked. Blood starts dripping from his nose, and he wipes it with the back of his hand, leaving a reddish smear.

He kisses Zayn's eyelids, and he slips away when Zayn tries to hold him against his chest with clumsy arms. His breath reeks. When he bends to press his lips to Zayn's collarbone, he stops.

"What's it means?" he asks.

It takes a minute for Zayn to remember what he's talking about, but eventually he gets it and he sheds a little smile. Right – the tattoo. His brain is foggy – he thinks about the sleeping pills in his bedside drawer and the slumber he'll fall into when he takes one, after this. He'll give Harry one, he thinks, and it seems like something big, something generous, almost a declaration of love.

" _Ulysses_ ," he says. "You know him?"

(He doesn't know if Harry's been to school. He looks like he spent his youth sucking strangers' cocks for white powder, but maybe it's just his lips, pouty and red and obscene, always full with blood, that make Zayn think that.)

"Yeah," Harry mumbles. "What 'bout him?"

Zayn doesn't want to say he's failed, that it was about a promise he made to someone who wasn't Harry (but lately he's the only one he makes promises to, even in the rare minutes when he's sober), so he just pulls Harry closer, brain stuck on repeat ( _sleepsleepsleep_ ), kisses him with tired eyes and tired blood and tired body and says, "Something about mermaids."

They sleep for three hours and when they wake up the craving is back with a vengeance.

*

A fire burns down the squat and John. Three others died in there too, but Zayn didn't know them well (he remembers having seen one, Niall, slowly lose his smile and turn manic and crazed, his pale skin permanently marred – blue-black around his eyes and red-red on his arms and flanks). He imagines them running around, laughing and crying (their synapses were probably lying at the back of their heads, whispering that it was only just another bad dream, another monster from their little friend, they would wake up sake and sound, as usual, as usual…).

He doesn't stop. He tugs at Harry's sleeve and they go crash at one of their friends's apartment, sleeping all day and half-living at night. Harry has always been skinny, but now he's almost rachitic. Sometimes he goes out for a few hours (but Zayn loses track) and comes back with cash. He shares. Zayn sometimes slurs 'thank you' and blows him.

There is something here, something simmering that they don't talk about, and Zayn hears the mermaids calling him back into their arms and he tries to resist but he knows he won't, not for long. They go to clubs together and they dance, hips pressed and gyrating against each other. No one exists but them. 

Zayn falls again, teeth smashed against the ground.

"I love you," he says to Harry's diamond eyes, shining in the black black night, but then Harry isn't here anymore and there's a monster instead and his knees are buckling and his brain is reeling, panicked thumping at one hundred miles an hour.

He flails his hands and tries to make the madness go away. He hits something, maybe a face, maybe something else, something that cracks and twists under his hands, flesh.

"Of course there're scars," Harry says to him when he comes back, teeth bared. He shows them to Zayn as though they were trophies, covered in blood and spit and sweat, reptile scratches running high on his flank.

(The police wants them to testify in court for the fire – they believe it was criminal. They find them, by some improbable twist of fate, and they go to the hearing with numb gums and sweaty hands, stutter a few lies and shiver under the hard sunshine filtering through the high windows of the courtroom.)

*

Maybe there is a concert and Zayn loses it and his voice breaks and he screams and he undresses and he swears at everyone, arms outstretched, bared, jumping. Maybe Harry goes to an interview on television with bloodshot eyes and mumbles hideous slurs, talks very fast with his hands and forgets everything he knows, instead sharing his crazy dreams of other worlds and dirty freedom. Maybe it happens – maybe it's all another dream, this kind of dream that always leave them restless, breathing heavy.

There's no time to slow down, anyway, so they don't check, don't search for the truth, just follow the flow and the light every time it shows up. It all goes down in flames around them but they're happy with dirty blood and pasty mouths. They trash a hotel room in Arizona, curtains torn – drench themselves in a rain of soft feathers, the gutted pillows resting sadly on the floor. A TV flies through the window.

Maybe.

But there's an afternoon (in February, with a soft afternoon light and an anise bedspread), Valentine's day, when they don't drink or smoke or shoot up. They just lie there in a tangle of limbs, Zayn's head heavy on Harry's stomach, and they talk about things that don't matter, silly little nothings they never stop long enough to look at. They order two giant boxes of the most expensive chocolate they can find, and they laugh with brown tongues, fingers tangling playfully. They call each other 'Valentine' and make silly faces.

Harry tucks his face in Zayn's shoulder at some point and giggles quietly. It sends vibrations through Zayn's body, the good kind, the kind he's grown accustomed to, and for a moment he's frozen by the novelty and the realization and the sheer  _panic_ , but then Harry tugs him down and kisses him sweetly, stealing his worry out of him.

They end up throwing up everything when the night comes, because they can't do anything without excess, not drugs and not love and not chocolate, but it's all worth it anyway.

*

Zayn's not really sure when it starts. He lives in an altered temporality, day always fading into night when he starts to grasp it, Harry's face the only clock he has and believes, telling him things like  _storm_ and  _time to stop_ , but he doesn't stop because he doesn't know how to, or maybe has forgotten.

Waliyha calls him again and he mumbles crazy things about Harry, how beautiful, how very very  _beautiful_  he is, can you believe that, Wali, can you believe a pretty face like his, and he forgets she can't see, because he always forgets things like that (can you  _believe_  it, Wali, can you, even with blood and cuts and this black eye and the limp and everything, everything, can you believe it).

The fire scared Louis; he stopped everything (more or less – you never stop  _everything_ , that's a myth, Zayn would know) and took up AAA meetings with a man with tired eyes, Liam maybe. Zayn sees them together once, and he thinks that maybe they have something going on. He can't really see – the gentle hand Liam presses against Louis's forearm makes his jaw ache and tiny black spots dance before his eyes. (He doesn't know how to touch like that, not anymore – now his touches are either injuries or drunken caresses.)

Louis has tired eyes now, too. Zayn hates him for leaving, a jealous, egotistical hatred that burns his loins and make him want to puke. "We can get you out of this," he says, like he hasn't gone through it too, like he doesn't know the  _rush_ and the fucking happiness and the elation and everything else.

 "Fuck you," Harry says, right behind his elbow. He looks like a petulant child, he always does, but Zayn silently thanks him for being here, for not forcing him to lose control.

Louis shrugs – he's uncomfortable. Zayn wonders if Liam has driven him here to talk to them, or if they just happened to have a meeting nearby. "Look, I just -"

"We don't want your pity," Harry spits. Zayn wonders when they became a 'we'.

Louis holds his hands up in surrender. He looks like a fucking  _doctor_ , all apologetic and nice and pretending to be cured. Zayn despises him.

When he leaves, the car starting with a skid, spurting acrid fumes in their noses, Harry's lips curl in a sneer.

"Good riddance," he hisses.

Maybe Zayn kisses him to shut him up, maybe that was another time. He doesn't remember much from this evening, to be honest, but it's okay. He's used to it.

*

The tires of the car screech on the asphalt. Harry thinks about another life, but the heat of the night catches up with him, weighing on the nape of his neck. The head of Zayn's cock slips out of his mouth with a pop, and Harry has to focus to swallow it back. His jaw is slack and his mouth is dry, but it doesn't seem to matter.

A string of curses fall out of Zayn's mouth and into the wind, flying away like a bird of prey.

 Harry sucks harder, blood pumping at his temples, and he feels like he can see the road through Zayn's eye, golden and ochre stretching into infinity, the essence of the american dream. He thinks about sand and licks and sucks and maybe slobbers a bit and deserts and police sirens.

They really are the best of people there is – the epic dreamers everyone remembers, lying on a magazine spread with lazy eyes and leather jackets, whispering about liberty and road trips and motorbikes. They're famous and golden and possibly in love – what could there be other than that?

The car swerves all of a sudden.

 "Police," someone yells, "get out of the car!"

Harry wants to think, but there's a shiver above him and hot semen rushing in his mouth. He struggles to swallow it all, lets a bit dribble down his chin.

(Someone has to tell him about the arrest – he only sees pictures later, him being led away, hands behind his back, looking manic, the corner of his mouth white, Zayn's hand low on his back.  _Decline_ , they say, but he's not so sure.)

*

It's entirely by chance that Zayn stumbles on Harry cutting himself. It's not even that surprising – Zayn knew it, but his brain had catalogued the scars away somewhere dark and just forgotten about it. It's something else to see the razorblade slide across Harry's skin effortlessly, a brush on a canvas of pale skin, leaving behind long carmine stripes. It's easy to see that he's an experienced cutter: he's holding the blade just right to make it hurt, sitting in the bathtub so that it doesn't get too messy.

His teeth are clenched.

Zayn would ask,  _why do you do that?_ but he knows, god, he knows, so he doesn't ask, just walks in and kind of stands there in the hope that it'll make him stop.

Harry doesn't even pretend to be embarrassed – maybe ashamed, but it's hard to tell, he's so pale. His cheeks are sunken, Zayn realizes. It must be a sort of curse that he's so beautiful – it makes it that easier to forget all the suffering painted on his skin, or to write it off as childish angst.

"What are you doing here?" he asks, voice clipped, sounding exhausted.

 Zayn wants to bend and press a kiss to his lips, try to steal the pain away from him, swallow it somehow and let it grow dark and mouldy into his heart instead of Harry's, but there's a soft 'cling' as the blade falls from Harry's suddenly limp hand, and Harry is fainting, right in front of his eyes, exhaling a soft sigh as he falls backwards. His head hits the faucet.

Zayn jumps forward.

His blood is not clean (is never clean) and he sees everything a bit distorted, the colors unsure and leaking, but there's blood pooling around Harry, more than he thought, and suddenly he's in the bathtub too, kneeling next to Harry, pulling him up ang against his chest.

"Wake up," he murmurs, a crazy, insistent whisper. "Wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup, for god's sake, wake up!"

Harry doesn't wake up.

It takes the cold water hitting his face, rinsing the blood off the bottom of the bathtub but not Zayn's trousers, to finally bring him back to consciousness, spluttering. He looks alternatively at Zayn's face and his thigh that Zayn has wrapped his tee-shirt around, red now.

He starts crying, choked, hurtful sobs that screech as they pass the barrier of his throat. Zayn holds him too tightly, enough to leave bruises, and they let the cold water try to drown them, willing the pain to go away and knowing it won't.

*

The cell they threw them in is dark and grey and nothing like the ones on the movie sets. Light doesn't filter by the minuscule window at the top left, and when night falls, the darkness submerges them, pure, liquid black. Zayn likes it.

"Fuck, I need a cigarette," he says. His hands are shaking, badly. He spares a second to think,  _withdrawal? Already?_

 Harry doesn't say anything. He's kneeling on the ground, Zayn realizes, his forehead against the cold ground, still. He's shaking too – his fingers look like they're playing a piano melody on their own, something fast and fervent, maybe Bach. Zayn wishes they could come back to being glorious. The silence stretches over them and tries to suffocate them.

"Are you afraid of the dark?" Harry asks with a small voice, cracks visible, almost obscene. "Do you sometimes wish you could take a train and leave for fucking anywhere that didn't have what you left has? Do you sometimes think that nowhere will ever be away enough?"

 _Maybe_ , Zayn thinks.

"I don't know," he says. 

The night wastes itself in quiet sobs and silence. When they kiss, it feels like a down: cold and sad, tobacco, come and the remnants of a glory they're always on the edge of losing.

*

The guy they'd been living with kicks them out. They stumble into the night with light backpacks, laughing against each other's cheeks, and spend a cold night on a bench that wipes the smile off their faces. The winter worms its way under their skin and turns them into glass statues.

They have enough money to take a train to somewhere that would be better, hopefully (Zayn whispers 'Walyiha', and the forgetful name spreads its warmth over them for a moment) or to come back the back-alley of  _Joey's_  they know by heart and buy a little more solid happiness. They kiss in the middle of the road, feverish, not to have to decide.

"I love you," says Harry, frail, fragile Harry with his scars and bad habits and shaking hands and curls and green, green eyes.

"I love you too," Zayn answers.

It's really as good as they can have, junkie love with bad kisses surrounded by the smell of trashcans, bloodied lips pressed against each other and trying to hurt just that little bit less (but they're always aching for more, more,  _more_ ).

(They end up buying the cocaine and sharing it in the night. Harry presses the syringe against Zayn's skin and struggles to find a vein, and they kiss messy and sloppy through the high. They fuck in a park, marred skin in the judgmental night.

But maybe Harry does something the day after, something Zayn doesn't want to know about, and comes back with croissants and plane tickets, tells him to hurry up with crazy eyes. His hand is splayed on Zayn's stomach when they kiss again .He feels like the five pads of pressure below his ribs is the first real thing he's tasted in months, and maybe it tastes a little like salvation.)

*

They get out three days after (Zayn thinks about a Monopoly board,  _get out of jail free_ , as he buries his hand into Harry's curls and mutters salty endearments into his skin), escorted by police officers and thrown into the rapacious hands of the paparazzi outside. The flashes blind them for a minute, but they're used to it. Their lawyers stand around them like a hoard of serious-faced vultures.

They disappear into a sleek limousine, Harry's slight frame sliding effortlessly across the dark leather. They smile at each other, and it takes Zayn a second, as their eyes meet, green against brown, to realize that this isn't going to stop them, that they're going to continue, go down this road and stop only when they're dead.

He lifts his glass of champagne for a toast. Harry meets him halfway.

"'Til death do us part," they say in the same breath.

The limousine starts silently, sliding through the traffic under the hard american sun.

*

"It isn't as simple as that," Liam says each time they start a session. Walyiha nods behind his back.

Louis is just there, somewhere. The first time they left, he's the one who found them, smoking slumped against a concrete wall, and brought them back.

"Hi," says Harry. He takes a breath. Zayn looks at him and thinks,  _no saving for this one_ like a broken record. "I'm Harry, and I'm a cocaine addict."

The contempt dripping from his word is lost in the careful applaud. Zayn stands up. It's always the same thing, the same thing, again and again – it's maddening. Zayn thinks distantly about how much he hates this world that doesn't shimmer, and these gray skies full of unshed tears.

Harry squeezes his hand,  _we're in this together, whatever this is_ , and Zayn finds himself wondering if maybe there is saving, after all. Who knows?

But the truth is, life isn't fair and saving is for innocents, and when Harry falls sick two months later Zayn ought to be surprised but he really isn't. The doctor tells them that it most probably is from an dirty syringe or 'unprotected intercourse'. Harry spits in his face.

 _HIV_ , he whispers the hideous name in Zayn's skin and bites him to draw blood.  _Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind,_ Zayn thinks in reply, like it makes sense – but it doesn't.

When Harry dies a year later, Zayn takes the gun out of his bedside drawer, kisses Walyiha on the cheek and Louis on the mouth, lightly, whispers 'Be happy' in his ear like it's easy, buys a bottle of vodka and drives his car off the bridge.


End file.
